Bookslut

October 2004

Judging a Book By Its Cover: The Fall Continues

I was a little wary starting "Judging a Book By Its Cover." I wasn’t
really sure how to approach it seeing that there’s not much commentary
about book jackets, but hopefully I have made you, the reader, think about book
design a little more consciously. I’m not a graphic design professional
who’s had years of training in type design and the like, but I have been
through the masochistic gauntlet of architecture school and I am fairly familiar
with design in general -- even though I don’t have that extra-Spidey sense
of immediately distinguishing the differences between Stempel Garamond and Adobe
Garamond, but I try to make a fair analysis of the book covers and hopefully
spark lively discourse on book design overall.

On another note: this month’s subject will deal with, again, fall releases.
There’s just a tsunami of books that have come out, and you know it’s
that time of the year when publishers pump out whatever they consider to be
noteworthy -- it’s the equivalent of the Christmas movie season, but not
as much money is involved and writers, even the best ones, are really D-list
celebs when it comes down to it. Next month, I will analyze more fall/winter
releases. Just bear with me.

In a land long ago and far away, this critic worshiped at the irony-ridden
and smarty-pants altar of “contemporary art.” If I could, I would
have had my home filled with Damien Hirst chochkes and Tracey Emin panties --
don’t ask what I was thinking. But I’m not so beholden to that strain
anymore save for the odd piece here and there, and as witnessed by my
recent flogging of John Currin, I really don’t have a lot of hope
in art right now. It just doesn’t move me or it seems downright facetious
and too downtown hipsterish, which makes it all the more surprising that I am
really digging Cintra Wilson’s book cover.

Wayne White, noted painter and the voice for Randy and Dirty Dog at Pee Wee’s
Playhouse, is the guy responsible for Cintra Wilson’s startlingly surreal
book cover. He apparently goes around garage sales and thrift stores snatching
up cheesy and cheap lithographs and prints, and he paints three-dimensional
letters on them. Anything is really fair game -- from serene pastoral scenes
to still lifes -- they all get painted with large nonsensical kind of phrases.
Others I have seen are I
Love the Whole Fucking World and Painting
that Came to Life Only to be Mocked-Forgotten.

There’s this wacky and fun sensibility that informs White’s work
and is perfectfully encapsulated in this particular book cover. It’s just
perfect. The way he merges the lithograph and the title of the book is totally
seamless. Shadows of leaves and branches fall convincingly on the letters. The
last “e” in “nature” brushes up against some shrubbery.
The creek reflects the letters in a realistic manner. The individual characters
themselves resemble the multi-colored magnets you would have on your refrigerator.
The cover painting is just really clever and funny in the visual parlance of
a David LaChapelle photograph or those melting and surreal visuals that Salvador
Dali conjured up, and indeed, White seems to tip his hand more and more at the
direction of that befuddled and mustached artist in some of his later works
where the letters stretch, bend, and tip into hilarious illegibility.

My only complaint? I thought the designer was being lazy in darkening the
background under the handwritten phrase “A Novel” and the author’s
name. He could have done a more deft job with that one like choosing a different
font or picking out the right color instead of white so it could pop out more.

There’s also one other thing I have been wondering. What came first?
The book title or the painting? I wonder if Wayne White gave permission for
Wilson to use one of his paintings for the title and the cover or if Wilson
asked White to make a special painting for her book. I’d go for the former.
The title has the same zany air as his other pieces.

If I Knew Then by Amy Fisher and Robbie Woliver
iUniverse
ISBN: 0595324452

Amy Fisher is a soccer mom. Seems funny we should see those two nominally
opposing subjects line up in the same sentence, but the former Long Island Lolita
has finally grown up, served her time, got a job, married, and has a son and
even a baby girl on the way -- a much better ending for our very own Dolores
Haze. And she has a new book out that she’s been plugging on Oprah and
various media outlets, and surprise surprise, it’s not put out by some
big-name publishing house but instead by iUniverse.
I wonder what the rationale was for going with iUniverse. Knopf wasn’t
interested? I really don’t think so. There’s a ready market for
people who follow these kinds of stories. My guess is that Amy Fisher and her
co-writer didn’t want to wrangle with an agent and publisher over the
profits and instead cut out those middle men and make more money by self-publishing.

The book package itself is really nice. Maybe it’s the soft bigotry
of low expectations, but the book cover is slickly done -- it’s really
polished, really professional. I have to admit that if it was from a publishing
house, I would dismiss the cover as kind of boring and conventional, but I am
duly impressed by the high quality that iUniverse esteemed themselves to on
the whole look of the book. It’s a trade paperback with a glossy cover
finish. It utilizes some good old and dependable serif text face and basically
gives the book an air of respectability -- if slightly pedestrian respectability.
It doesn’t hurt that Amy Fisher is cute either.

Perusing the iUniverse website, there are different levels of publishing packages
that you can purchase if you are ever so inclined to self-publish -- all the
way from “Fast Track” to “Premier
Plus Package." My guess is that Amy Fisher picked “Premier Plus
Package” for the relatively reasonable price of $748. With that, she got
a custom cover design by some unknown graphics monkey, editorial review, “back
cover copy polish,” and ten free copies of the finished product. Not bad,
eh? I wonder if iUniverse is becoming a respectable alternative to publishing
houses -- especially if you have a ready made audience who’ll buy your
book no matter it’s provenance. Just imagine if Stephen King published
his next novel on iUniverse! Would he make more money? But what’s actually
more interesting has been its quiet use by famous writers to keep in circulation
their out-of-print titles. Instead of whining to their agents about their babies
not being available, they have taken matters into their own hands and self-published
on iUniverse. Among this
selective crowd are Lawrence Block, William F. Buckley Jr., and Joyce Maynard
of all people. And yes, like Amy Fisher’s book, all the covers are nice
and behave like obedient little children, and yeah, this critic is duly impressed
by the professionalism of the book covers and packages, but I am waiting for
the first iUniverse book cover to take an imaginative and more risky path. Maybe
this is too much to ask.

Coming from somebody who did like Michael Moore’s latest documentary,
I can say with no trace of partisan hackery that his new book’s cover
is deeply, deeply ugly. It looks like the kind of book you’d find remaindered
in the front shelves of Barnes and Noble where they keep all the bargain books
corralled together. The book cover is ugly and cheap looking and suffers from
a lack of focus. Not so much in terms of layout -- the design is pretty symmetrical
and doesn’t affect some Pomo look, but instead I feel myself affronted
by the use of too many fonts and styles. There are at least three different
typefaces used on the cover with varying sizes and all used to ill effect. The
use of italics for the main title is really cheesy and dated looking. It harks
back to the Go
Ask Alice book cover. The red san serif block type doesn’t jive
with the main title. The fonts are all used with very little finesse and a unifying
thematic approach. They just don’t fit together. Using Michael Moore’s
face for the cover doesn’t help either. Must all his books carry his pudgy
mug? I know, I know. Michael Moore is a brand now, but his overly sincere countenance
and his hands clasped reverently around a small folded flag just seem so self-righteous
and self-promoting. The Official
Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader book cover is much better due to its tongue-in-cheekiness.
Moore is much more convincing being satirical and snarky than he is at being
sincere.

As for Susan Orlean’s book, it is a great read, but chuck the front
cover. It sucks. Like the previous entry, Susan Orlean’s latest book cover
utilizes too many fonts -- five actually. The particular fonts used and their
grouping is not as egregious as Michael Moore’s, but almost. The thing
about using too many typefaces is the lack of a thematic approach. The book
cover will seem unfocused and at times, in Moore’s case, tacky. I think
you can throw down an architectural equivalent to Moore’s and Orlean’s
book cover. Have you ever seen an Eric Owen Moss building or any noted structure
by a California architect? They have a tendency to use too many different materials
and the buildings look too busy and verge on kitsch. Moore’s is like that.
Orlean's book cover is helped by most of the words being grouped to the left
and the author photo to the right -- it adds a little more visual interest.
But yet again, there are just too many fonts! Did the designer have to succumb
to the New Yorker-esque typeface for the writer’s name? I wish she used
something less ubiquitous or clichéd. The vomit-puke green for the cover
doesn’t lend any help. It’s a nasty day-glo color -- only fit for
80’s leg warmers and slime from the show You Can’t Do That On
Television. The only good thing about the cover is Susan Orlean’s
photo, but I have one quibble with it. Yeah, she’s cute and I love her
tailored suit and stilettos, but if you have read her book, the photo doesn’t
fit. She writes in this compassionate and deferential style where her voice
doesn’t interject itself too much into any particular piece. She doesn’t
really focus on herself a whole lot, but the photo is telling a different story.

On a last note, I have noticed that most books’ covers are designed
with a minimalist bent. Not so much in that specific art style, but in terms
of using simple and yet effective use of colors, photos, and most of all fonts.
We used to have the artisanal tradition of embossed leather and gold leafing
along with intricate patterns and designs on our books, and the present day
equivalent of that would seem to be the over-use of fonts. I think that approach
tends to dilute the effectiveness of what the cover and the book are trying
to communicate. That approach just looks too busy, but in the right hands, and
this is just a handful from what I’ve seen, it can be done right -- but
very rarely. As for the books reviewed in this particular segment, I don’t
care too much for Michael Moore’s book. I’m sure it will sell well
despite the fact it’s an obvious rush job, but I wring my hands at Orlean’s
book. I’m not kidding when I say it’s a great book, but how many
people will be turned off by the ghastly green cover and the mish-mash use of
fonts and not buy it at all?

I should have known that Chip Kidd, book cover impresario, was responsible
for this cover. When I was at Barnes and Noble researching this column, I saw
a handful of people do double takes at the cover. It’s a very intriguing
photo. How did the photographer coax a cup of water to disobey the law of gravity?
Photoshop? Other than that, I appreciate the fact that Kidd gave the image front
and center importance -- it ties in with the title, and the use of the Playbill
font variant/kissing cousin adds a subtle touch of substantiability to the cover.
A font with thin and attenuated strokes and combined with the overall blue color
of the cover would make the title seem too flimsy, so it was a nice touch for
Kidd to pick a type face with thick, slabbed serifs and hefty but nicely modulated
forms. What a beautiful and simple antidote to the clutter we usually find on
other book covers!